A teleconference is a meeting between two or more participants who are not at the same place at the same time. Teleconferencing is a low-cost alternative to getting large groups of invitees in a single place at the same time for the purpose of having a meeting. The best known example of a teleconference is a conference call with more than two people participating in the call. These teleconferences can have upwards of several hundred people and can last for several hours. An alternative to having a teleconference would be to get these people to the same place at the same time, which is often prohibitive.
Some teleconferencing systems in the prior art have a method of displaying a roster of conference attendees or of playing back a roll call of those attendees. In at least some of those prior-art systems, however, the roster does not differentiate between attendees who are active participants and attendees who are passive listeners. Furthermore, some teleconferencing systems in the prior art have a method of scheduling new teleconferences based on the schedules of potential invitees; however, at least some of those systems do not take into account that the potential invitees can be different from one another in terms of their importance to a teleconference being scheduled.
Therefore, what is needed is an improved teleconference system, in particular that accounts for both the behavior and characteristics of attendees of teleconferences that have already taken place as well as teleconferences that are currently in progress, without some of the disadvantages in the prior art.